Andrew Coyne: Bulging cabinet underlines that ministerships are given as prizes

One of the many fantasies in which people who write about politics are obliged to indulge is that cabinet shuffles matter. They don’t, as a rule, or not in any substantive sense, because cabinet itself has long since ceased to matter.

It did, once, and it does, still, in systems where cabinets are small and individual ministers loom large. But our cabinets have grown to such a size that ministers, most of them, have dwindled to comparative specks. A very few portfolios matter, and a smaller number of ministers. The rest are placeholders.

The latest edition of cabinet is no different than its recent predecessors in this regard, except that it is even larger and more inconsequential. Sir John A. needed just a dozen ministers to run the country; Mackenzie King fought Depression and World War with fewer than 20; even Pierre Trudeau made do for much of his time in office with 30. But somehow Stephen Harper needs nearly 40. It is more than twice as large as the cabinets of the United States, Germany or Japan, half again as large as that of the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand.

Cabinet has swollen, not in response to the demands of government, but the needs of politics; to keep up the supply of offices, new responsibilities have had to be invented, each one less essential than the last. Absolutely nothing rides on who the minister of state for Western Economic Diversification is, or the minister of state for Consular Services, or the minister of state for Sport, or any of the dozens of other posts that proliferated over the years.

The people to whom these offices are awarded may be talented, but that is not why they were selected, nor is that what the jobs entail. Rather, they are prizes to be handed out, either as a reward for individual loyalty or to purchase the loyalty of the constituencies — region, sex, ethnicity — they represent.

This is why after every cabinet shuffle the discussion tends to centre, not on the talents or ideas of the appointees but on how “representative” the result is: how many ministers there are from each region, or province, or even city; how many women, how many visible minorities and so on. It is a tacit admission that the individuals, like the jobs themselves, do not matter.

Even so spectacularly unimpressive a figure as Christian Paradis, the former Industry minister, could not actually be dropped from cabinet, but only moved into one of these made-up posts, since the alternative would be to reduce Quebec’s representation in cabinet from a barely tolerable four ministers (out of the province’s five Tory MPs) to an unacceptable three.

So far as the jobs have any requirement, it is to act as spokesmen: mostly for the prime minister, occasionally for their departments. Yet even here it is not so much talent that is required as loyalty. Or perhaps I should say a talent for self-abasement: a willingness to say whatever is required of them, no matter how implausible or untrue.

It will be noticed how many of the new appointees — Chris Alexander, Kelly Leitch, Pierre Poilievre, Shelly Glover — are familiar dispensers of government talking points, in Parliament and on television. Yet you couldn’t say any of them were particularly “good” at it, at least in the sense of being able to present a case in a persuasive or sympathetic fashion. They recite their lines robotically, often get facts wrong, make no attempt to reach out to the uncommitted. It is rather for their readiness to take one for the team, to spout the same line in response to every question, to conquer, through sheer repetition, the very concept of sense — if all else fails, to run out the clock — that they have been rewarded.

It will be noticed how many of the new appointees — Chris Alexander, Kelly Leitch, Pierre Poilievre, Shelly Glover — are familiar dispensers of government talking points, in Parliament and on television

Still, even if cabinet has become a mere extension of the prime minister (the notion of a Canadian prime minister as “first among equals” is simply quaint) a shuffle may be useful as a signal of his intent: of the themes the prime minister wishes to emphasize, the abilities he wishes to reward, the direction he wishes to take. And the signal this shuffle sends is, broadly, more of the same.

If there are changes of policy in the works, they await the Speech from the Throne: with most of the major economic portfolios, from Finance to Treasury Board, remaining in the same hands, and none of the other major posts assigned to notably independent thinkers, it is hard to read much into the current lineup.

As for tone — the relentless partisanship, the disdain for Parliament, the lowbrow rhetoric and underhanded tactics and general nastiness for which this government is notorious — the message is quite emphatic: there will be no change. If the retention of the much-loathed Peter Van Loan as government house leader suggests simple obstinance, the elevation of the oily Poilievre — to minister of “democratic reform,” yet — is positively insulting. Whatever flak the government may have taken on this front, the prime minister does not think it is serious: an obsession of the media, but not something that matters to the general public.

It appears, rather, to be less of a PR exercise than HR — pruning some of the worst deadwood, recruiting some new blood, plus a little succession planning: with the reassignment of Jason Kenney to Employment and James Moore to Industry, along with Diane Finley at Public Works and Rona Ambrose at Health, the outlines of a future leadership race start to take shape. Just as long as no one thinks any of it matters.